SAMER ABU-LTAIF: Good afternoon. On behalf of Microsoft I want to welcome you all. This is a very special day for us in the region today, because we are announcing a significant innovation from Microsoft, but also we are tying it to something that is tightly related in many ways to how the innovation is going to land in our region.

Today, we are announcing the launch of Office 365, which is taking the suite of the Office that you are all acquainted with into the cloud. That represents a huge opportunity for all of us as customers in this region. Partners, small and medium enterprises are going to leverage from it. We believe we have a huge potential to realize together in making sure that we leverage from this technology, we leverage from its impact on our economies.

But before we go there, I want to also introduce a topic that is tightly connected. It’s the emergence of devices and innovations that Microsoft is leading with.

Today, we have John Case, the OEM vice president for sales, that is going to show what you see behind me of innovations from Microsoft on Windows. Those are the powerful devices that are fueled by also the impact that cloud is going to make. People want to be connected anytime, anywhere to the information they need and want. They want to be connected to each other, and they want scenarios to be available through cloud that were never possible before.

Microsoft is leading the way in that direction, and in this session, in this keynote session at GITEX we decided to launch these activities with the presence of John Case and also our corporate vice president, Takeshi Numoto, who is also here with us to share with you what Office 365 will deliver.

But before going to the Office 365 launch, I invite John to take us through the innovation of devices from Microsoft on Windows 7. John? (Applause.)

JOHN CASE: Thank you, Samer.

Thank you, thank you, and welcome to all of you. First, I want to say thank you for joining us. We are honored that you are joining us today. This is a very important time for us, and I’d like to speak on behalf of all my colleagues from Microsoft, thanking you for your time and your presence here. And I hope that what we’ll show you today will be interesting to you, as it is to us.

We’re going to do two things today. The first is I’m going to spend some time talking about the current state of the hardware market and showing some of the devices behind me. You can see where we’re headed, what our view is today of innovation in the industry. And then secondly, I’ll turn it over to Takeshi Numoto, who’s the corporate vice president for Microsoft Office, who will talk though things that are happening on the Office side, specifically with Office 365. So, that’s our plan for the next sort of hour and a half or so. So, again thanks for joining us.

This is my first GITEX, I should say that. I’m very excited about this today. I’ve been walking around today looking at some of the things happening outside, and I’m very impressed by the level of sophistication, innovation, and energy that I see around the room, and I see out in the hall. So, I look forward to spending more time here over the next couple of days. So, again thanks very much for having us, and we’re very happy that you could join us here for the next hour and a half or so.

So, here’s what we’ll go through for the next little while, and I think that the interesting thing that you see in our industry is just how dynamic it is, how fast it moves all the time.

I still have my original IBM PC AT that I had from the late 1980s. It doesn’t work so well anymore, but I do still have it.

If you think back to that time, that was a very exciting time in the computing industry: PCs, the first graphical user interfaces, the first real spreadsheets, the first word processors. Quickly, quickly that was supplanted by the whole client-server movement, right, computing power, distributed computing, the way we were working with environments inside companies, inside schools.

And then right away just a few years later, the Internet era took over. We all remember the browser wars. We all remember e-mail becoming the kind of primary form of collaboration and documentation that we work in still today. And I think this was a tremendous, tremendous leap in innovation that happened kind of in the mid-’90s and later.

The last decade has been more about the cloud, and the cloud is both a way to take advantage of all that computing power, but also a new set of platforms for collaboration, for social networks, transforming businesses around the world, at the same time providing new ways for consumers to communicate, new ways for consumers to talk to each other.

And the cloud is a very exciting time, and we’re just beginning — we really are just beginning. I see the future of this ecosystem as changing at least as much as the last 20 years, at least as much. We’re going to see a few of those little things today, how that’s going to progress over the next few years, things like natural user interfaces, things like language innovation, standards like HTML5 that are the next level of platform innovation; you’re going to see some of that today.

Ecosystems that were separate, the phone ecosystem, the PC ecosystem, the server ecosystem, are today becoming more and more unified. That’s where I think the next five years will take us, really a deep level of unified ecosystems across devices in a way we’ve never seen before. So, we’re going to show you some of that today and sort of the way those things are evolving.

And what’s Microsoft doing in that world, where are we trying to innovate, what’s our stance on that level of innovation, what’s our vision, and I want to talk about that a little bit, too.

Microsoft’s vision today is pretty clear, to create seamless experiences that combine the magic of software with the power of the Internet across a range of devices, a world of devices, right?

That says a lot. We are still a software company, we’re going to stay a software company. At the same time, we think that the better we work with the device ecosystem, the better our software can be used, and the more experiences we can create that mean even more to consumers, small businesses, large businesses, students around the world. That’s our vision.

So, what you’re going to see for the next hour or so, both in the device range behind us, in the demos that you’ll see using the software. We’re going to show you those seamless experiences, some that we create, some that we work with partners on, and that’s going to be a pretty interesting set of things to see.

So, what’s our approach, how do we do this? I sort of believe there are three levels to this, three levels of emphasis or three levels of investment, as it were. The first is today more than ever we need a world of smart devices — not one, not two, a world of smart devices, of all categories, shapes and sizes. Choice matters in this industry. Customers will choose to do things differently than they have before, they want devices that fit their specific needs. You’re going to see today a whole bunch of devices of different shapes, sizes, form factors, speeds, usage types. We need a world of smart devices, and they need to be smart. They need to create data, they need to connect to the cloud.

Connecting to the cloud is the next stage of emphasis. Software like Internet Explorer, standards like HTML, developer technologies like Silverlight: These are the ways we expect that world of devices to bridge to the cloud.

The cloud for us is the extension of rich experiences that once began on the desktop or on the server, and it’s making them richer and more interesting to users and more compelling every single day.

And then the third level of emphasis for Microsoft is there are some seamless experiences we’ll create ourselves, things that we think we can drive with our software platform. You’ll see one great deep dive into that today with Office and Office 365. I think Xbox and gaming is another example of a great seamless experience, the way you can work on the Internet, on your Xbox, on your phone; you’ll see some of that today as well.

So, a world of smart devices, connected to the cloud, and seamless experiences to go with it, that’s sort of our areas of emphasis and focus.

Within that we think there is a tremendous amount of opportunity, innovation happening at many, many layers, software, hardware, services and above. And we’re going to go through each of these in turn for the next little while.

But for us that opportunity is today even more than it’s ever been. We think the industry is more ready for this innovation also than it has ever been. When I look at the things that are happening in the device range, the industry is innovating at a pace more rapid than it has ever innovated before — this is my belief.

So, we’ll go through a lot of this today. We’ll talk about some devices, where we see innovation, trends that we see, we’ll talk through what’s happening on the browser with IE9, we’ll talk about the cloud, right, server and cloud, we’ll talk about communications, cloud services to go with the communications, we’ll spend some time in entertainment, and then last we’ll hit productivity, and again we’ll have a whole second keynote on productivity when I’m finished up here. That’s how we’ll spend the next few minutes.

The first thing I should discuss really is Windows 7. I suspect most, if not all of you, are users of Windows 7. You may not know GITEX two years ago was the first place we sold Windows 7. We sold it here four days earlier than the rest of the world, and that was a very important event for us.

Since that date two years ago, we’ve sold something like 400 million licenses of Windows 7 around the world. That’s three times faster than the Windows XP adoption, three times faster than Windows XP adoption.

Today, the data tells us that something like 30 percent of all PCs connected to the Internet run Windows 7. So, by all statistical measures it’s a very successful product, and we think that’s great.

That’s not just true for consumers. On the corporate side companies like IDC tell us that their surveys indicate something like 90 percent of all enterprises around the world are headed towards Windows 7 in the short term. We think that’s great momentum.

Forrester tells us that Windows 7 has become the de facto industry standard for corporate computing.

And yet still it powers 30 percent of the world’s PCs. So, there’s still a lot of room for that to grow. And, in fact, the Windows 7 numbers are ticking up every single day.

Windows 7 is also the highest rated product release we’ve ever had on the Windows side, so the highest customer satisfaction, the most satisfied customers. So, that’s a great thing for us and for our industry when it comes to rapid pace of adoption.

And the last thing I’d say is that Windows 7 has created a huge ecosystem of economics beyond just the software. For every dollar of Windows revenue the ecosystem makes $8 of revenue in software, hardware, services, and assorted add-ons. So, Windows 7 is a catalyst that’s created a huge investment wave in all parts of the industry. So, by all our measures Windows 7 is successful.

But the best news is we’re not done yet, right? Windows 7 has still got plenty of room to go. And all the innovation you’re going to see behind me, all of it is on current Windows 7 platforms, things that are shipping right now or shipping in the next few weeks, things you might not have seen before that will allow us to continue to grow Windows 7 for the next foreseeable future. So, we’re very excited about that.

At the same time, I’m sure many of you have been following the news on Windows 8. We had a developer conference in the U.S. a few weeks ago called BUILD. At BUILD we went through a pretty detailed preview of Windows 8, what we’re calling Windows 8, the next version of Windows.

If you want to find out more about it, this is the URL, BuildWindows.com. You can download the Windows 8 developer preview. I’m running it on a couple of my PCs right now. And you can see what it’s like, see what the news is all about.

We’re going to spend time today primarily on the current platform, right, what we have to sell today, but I would expect us more and more over time to be talking about the future platform, and that’s an exciting development because we do think Windows 8 is the reimagining of Windows, and we think that’s very exciting. So, I’ll leave that to you to go follow up on BuildWindows.com.

Beyond the PC there is a whole range of devices that are running Windows today that you may not be as familiar with. The first I want to talk about is what we called embedded devices. Embedded devices are specialized or single purpose devices that have a copy of Windows running on them that exist for a single dedicated purpose. You probably checked in at the airport in a kiosk on a Windows device. You probably bought coffee today from your coffee shop. The cash register was probably a Windows device. And the list goes on and on and on.

Something like 1 billion processors a year are sold into what we call embedded. This is a very interesting and exciting ecosystem.

These devices are getting smarter and smarter all the time, generating more and more data. What we see are really true intelligent systems that allow retailers or allow industrial companies or allow healthcare companies to capture data, send it to their back-end, process it possibly through the cloud and learn more about their customers, learn more about what people want from them and where they can perform better.

So, we think the embedded category is one that’s going to keep growing. It’s growing at a skyrocketing rate today. You’ve seen modernization happening in a whole range of industries like retail, like health care, like industrial automation, and embedded devices are the devices that will capture that growth in our IT ecosystem.

So, we thought one thing you might enjoy was seeing a video to show you just how many places in a day you might touch Windows for embedded devices. So, with that in mind, I’d like to cue the video from the back of the room just for a few minutes, please.

(Video segment.)

JOHN CASE: I like that, 45. I’ve never done 45 in a day myself, but I have hopes.

So, that’s Windows for embedded devices, and I think that is a very exciting vertical. We’re going to see some of those devices coming up in a few minutes, and we’ll get to that in just a second.

You’re probably also familiar with the Windows Phone. The current release of Windows Phone, what we call Windows Phone Mango, is shipping right now, launching right now in many countries around the world. We’re broadening language support for that all the time. We think this Windows Phone is the best one yet. I’m running it, all my friends are running it, my family is running it.

Mango does a tremendous number of things for us from a phone perspective. First is that we actually have new partners to work with. You see Fujitsu has joined the Windows Phone terrain, ZTE from China has joined, Acer is shipping Windows Phones for the first time; that’s very exciting.

There are a whole host of new features on Windows Phones, some of which we’ll show you in a demo in a few minutes.

And beyond that, we think that this platform release is doing the best job ever on the communications side. Thirty thousand apps have been built to date, and growing all the time, and Internet browsing.

So, we think this release of Windows Phone is actually truly a step forward, and we expect several more Windows Phone releases to come in the coming months. So, that’s exciting on Windows Phone as well. And you’re going to see some of those phones and some of the apps in just a few minutes.

The next category is the server, and I think you probably already know that Microsoft is the industry leader in server platforms, which we are very excited about.

We think right now that emphasis comes in three primary ways. The first is that we do have a very heavily used broad platform. Windows Server is the number one server in use today around the world. We think that broad platform is great for general use. We’ve seen great uptake of our virtualization software. Our management system behind System Center we think is the best in the industry. That business is going to keep growing. We see ISVs around the world innovating on that server platform.

Recently, we’ve actually made huge strides in the solutions space, solutions where we’re coming up with things like our Small Business Server. We recently shipped a product called Small Business 2011. It is the best first server for a small business.

Windows MultiPoint Server is another great example where a school or a company can use MultiPoint to control a whole number of terminals from a single administrator point. So, we’re very excited about that.

And the final area I wanted to touch was storage. We’ve recently made some strides with Storage Server, and we’ll have several OEMs shipping network attached storage devices, entry level storage products, for the first time, and we think that’s a great outcome for Windows, and we’ll show you some of those devices again in a few minutes.

Beyond the server I think you might be surprised to see the sheer number of things Microsoft is doing on the cloud. We have a tremendous array of platform software that powers the cloud, whether that be private cloud solutions, public cloud solutions or hybrid solutions, all coming from our server family. It’s listed across the bottom of the slide.

But we also have — you probably are familiar with the number of things we’re doing on the consumer space, industry-leading services, things like mail and Messenger, and we’ll talk about that again in a moment.

But on the commercial side that’s where all the innovation is happening right now. That’s where you see tons and tons of growth, companies entering the fray here. We have a lot that we’re doing. Office 365 is our primary platform offer there. It’s just been released in the last few months. You’re going to get a deep demo on that coming up in a few minutes.

Cloud for us has become a fascinating bridge between the device families and the traditional packaged software families, and I think that increasingly this is where we’re seeing innovation, software we’re releasing, we’re extending into the cloud, creating much, much richer, seamless experiences than ever before — than ever before.

Windows Live Essentials, which is our primary consumer cloud family, is used today by 500 million consumers around the world; Hotmail 350 million consumers around the world; Windows Live Messenger 300 million consumers around the world. Windows Live Essentials is a very rich, very full featured set of effectively free cloud services that comes with Windows, and it is the industry leader in most of those dimensions.

When you combine that with Bing, right, our search engine, it’s the fastest growing search engine in the world, up to about 15 percent usage in the United States, we see a tremendous amount of integration between the communications platform in consumers services and Bing.

In addition to that, we’re very committed to integrating those services with the predominant social networks of the day. If you want to go look, for example, and see how well Bing and Facebook integrate, you can search Facebook much better on Bing than any other platform, and you could make the same description about these other services listed here.

So, our commitment to the industry is to keep providing the best decision engine, Bing, and integrating it as best as possible with the predominant social networks, and we think that is a very exciting opportunity for all of us in the industry.

The next piece I want to talk about briefly is gaming, because we look at gaming increasingly as a great cloud experience that integrates across all device types. And I think to date maybe people are playing games on their PC or maybe they have an Xbox at home or increasingly on their phone, but what we’ve done through software is to create an experience that stretches across each of those device types.

Xbox Live today, which began simply as the online way to extend Xbox, has become the predominant gaming service in the world, and we think it is a fascinating place. There’s 35 million users on Xbox Live today, and that number is growing every day. And those are active users; they do a tremendous number of things on Xbox Live. I can get to Xbox Live on my phone, I can get there from my PC, I can easily get there from my Xbox.

And we actually just recently announced on Xbox not just our own content, Netflix is streaming through Xbox Live, Hulu, YouTube, Sky, you name it; we have a tremendous number of media partnerships to go with the gaming platform and our Zune software.

So, Xbox Live for us has become this really deep integration point for a seamless experience on gaming across different device types. That’s allowing our hardware partners to really innovate on the device, and to take advantage of that feature as much as possible.

The last thing I’ll touch on is the productivity platform. We are going to get another session on that in just a few minutes, but I did want to talk about this because to us Microsoft Office is obviously the best I’d call it application in history, no question, right, and I think that increasingly we see Office being extended through a series of things like Web apps, though online services like Office 365, and the possibilities in this are endless. Office 365 has had a very, very successful launch, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that. We have tens of thousands of companies that joined on Office 365 within the first few days of its release back in the summer.

So, Office 365 is a big opportunity for this region of the world, and it’s a big opportunity for everywhere in the world, because it is a really interesting way for companies to extend their Office experience.

So, we talked through those six levels of opportunity, things we said we were emphasizing. I want to turn now to the manufacturing side, because I really think there’s some innovation there that you may not be thinking about, and I think we’re going to go through manufacturing innovations, and then we’re going to go see some of the hardware pieces itself.

So, the first thing I wanted to do was pull up a set of things that we’ve been working on with our partners, mostly coming out of our ODM community in Taiwan, and I’ll show you a couple of these live.

The first is what we’ll call reusable materials or green materials. This is a piece of bamboo, and we’re going to put this on the camera hopefully. Good. This is a piece of bamboo that we’re using increasingly in PCs and notebooks. It’s got great heat conditions, it’s very light. This comes from Pegatron. You might have seen some of the PCs that Pegatron has made.

Secondly, here’s an internal piece from a laptop that was actually made from recycled medical supplies, believe it or not, or healthcare equipment. This is a way — again this is very light, very durable, allows us to actually do things that help the industry.

The next thing I want to show is glass and display. Increasingly what we see is that companies are innovating on the display, and that’s great, with thin bezels, great, great sort of high-durability glass. This is a different thing. This is a piece of Corning Gorilla glass, right, with a photo that we sent in. You can have any photo put on this that you wanted. This actually could become the back of your PC. So, let’s see if this is on, and you can actually see that on the screen up there. It lights up, it provides a great degree of customization. It’s Gorilla glass from Corning. It’s highly durable.

This is a terrific innovation that we’re seeing. So, I would expect to see on laptops like these more ways of customizing them for your own use and for your own look and feel, and we’re very excited about that. There’s a whole range of other things we can go into on that.

The second piece to talk about is actually the interface itself. The interface itself is evolving, and what was traditionally a mouse and keyboard interface has more and more become natural, right? And you see this every day when you swipe your phone or you do something with a gesture.

And more and more natural user interface for us is going to become a primary way of design. We see great innovations happening in handwriting. We’ll show you some of that in a minute. We see gesture recognition through things like the Kinect as being a huge way of new interface types with the PC. And certainly voice is the one that we see a lot of today as well.

The Kinect sensor, which I think many of you are familiar with, which was the number one selling consumer device in history — actually we did 8 million units in the first 60 days shipping the Kinect device — is all about both the gesture, seeing yourself, and we’ll demo that in a moment, as well as your voice. That thing is going to be used in a whole bunch of different ways going forward, not just the Kinect, which we’re very excited about.

I want to talk briefly about embedded automotive before I go more into the hardware. One of the things you may not know is that there are a whole host of partners around the world who are working with Windows to power cars. And those cars, you know, what are they doing with Windows? Well, Windows allows them to access their information, it allows them to use media, it allows them to control certain facets of the car. Every year, we’re adding one or two new partners to Windows Embedded automotive. The first was Ford, but certainly we’ve worked with many, many since them around the world.

This is all done through voice and touch. I never thought 10 years ago that we’d be using voice and touch to control major sensors in our car, or allowing me to play music off the Internet, or allowing me to talk to someone. This is a very exciting innovation in the car, and I think that this kind of thing will happen more and more in other day-to-day activities, which we’re also very excited about.

What’s exciting about our hardware ecosystem is that we still think it’s best positioned in the world. First of all, the scale of it, 1.2 billion and growing PC users every day, right, 1.2 billion. That doesn’t include even the embedded devices.

Secondly, we think that it is the most compatible, the widest array of software, the widest array of devices, the most choice. We think this makes the Windows ecosystem extremely, extremely powerful.

Third, the familiarity. Even as you go to new things like voice and touch and gesture recognition, it’s still Windows. You still know how to work it, you still are familiar with the look and feel, you understand intuitively how it works. So, familiarity is a big component of it.

And the last thing actually is what we’ll call peace of mind, security. You know that Windows is putting the best virus features in, you know Windows is putting the best security features in. We work with OEMs all the time to build the most secure devices we can build, because we do think regular updates and security are a huge part of the Windows ecosystem.

So, with that, I’m going to stop talking about slides, and I’ll actually show you some of these PCs. I’ve got a camera here that’s going to follow me. Hopefully you’ll be able to see some of them on the screen up here as we go through them one at a time. We’re going to start down here on the Windows Phone side, okay?

I mentioned we had a couple of new Windows Phone OEMs, partners. One of those I wanted to highlight specifically was Fujitsu. This is a new Fujitsu Windows Phone running the Mango software. This one has a 13 megapixel camera. It’s actually really pretty colored. I love the beautiful color. The other thing about it is they tell me it’s waterproof. So, we’re going to drop it in some water and see how it works.

Can you get the camera on that and see that it’s still running?

It’s still running. I love that phone.

The second thing I want to show you is actually a range of embedded devices. These are a few different things that we pulled from the industry. You saw some OEMs in that video. There’s several thousand OEMs we work with around the world on embedded. The total is probably 30,000 actually.

Here’s an example, this is actually a portable automotive unit that allows car mechanics to decode what’s wrong with your car, carrying around that device.

Here’s one that’s a portable ultrasound system for use in healthcare, and you can actually see I can carry this around with me, I can scan my hand, and it can actually show the bones inside. This is something that a doctor or a nurse could carry around a hospital to use without making the patient come to them.

Scanners, this is a Motorola RFID scanner that allows companies to put this for use, for example, across a retail floor. Motorola sells these based on Windows Embedded handheld at a very tremendous rate.

Here’s one called the GTAC. It’s also waterproof. It’s exactly the same kind of thing, but it’s ruggedized. I’m also going to put it in the bucket of water. So, let’s watch that. I’ll put that one up vertically so you can actually see it.

This is a wearable PC, also from Motorola, right? I can put this on, right, see things in my eye, right, and talk into it. So, I can actually see software from wearing this PC. Pretty interesting.

So, that’s kind of a bit of a sample of the world of the embedded device. We couldn’t bring in things like a gas pump or a car, but maybe we’ll do that next year.

I want to go down here next and look at some PCs, right, and first we’ll start with the commercial side. I want to show you a few devices that come from our big OEM partners on commercial PCs, things that are good for the enterprise.

The first I’ll show you is this Lenovo. This is the Lenovo X220 tablet. It’s a great PC at the same time. It has a swivel tablet screen. Touch works on this, the pen works on this. This is a really good device if you want a range of things to do in your office, so if you want different kinds of form factors.

Here’s one that’s made in Dubai. This is a Touchmate, right, which is a local manufacturer. They customize the back. It allows people to put all kinds of interesting bling on their devices, right? We like that? Right? You look around here, you see things like HP Probook, right, with Beats Audio, easily the highest rated audio PC in the commercial PC lineup. We like that.

Let’s go back to the slates, do that for a few minutes, because I think it’s pretty interesting.

Slates aren’t just for consumer applications. So, the first slate I want to show you is this Asus B121. This B121 actually has a TPN chip in it, allows you to run this inside your corporate network, will pass effectively any corporate security bar, and is running a Core i5. And you see this is CAD/CAM software. You can see it’s actually super-high responsiveness, and that’s running pretty powerful software on a slate. So, we think that’s very compelling.

Here’s a Samsung that’s actually just shipped, the Series 7 slate from Samsung, and you see how quickly this — how smooth the reaction is and how good the graphics are. Again this is a Samsung slate that’s just in market now.

We also have some slates here like this Acer and this MSI that are running AMD chips, right, and that’s a great evolution in the market. This Acer actually pops off the stand, right? It’s got a keyboard that goes with it, right, and the slate, allows you to do all kinds of different things with it.

Let’s move down this way. I’m going to take you to the gaming category, because we think the gaming category has got a lot of interesting things going on in it as well.

This is going to be a little complicated with the video, so bear with me.

This here is the Alienware, it’s an 18-inch Alienware laptop. We think it just might be the fastest laptop in the world. It runs two different graphics boards or graphics chips, GeForce graphics chips, and I’m going to show you a game on it just so you can see sort of how quick it is. I will crash the car. It’s just because I’m not very good at the game.

Anyway, there it is. I wonder if you can get that on the screen. I’ll crash it into the wall just for fun. There we go.

At the same time, we have other manufacturers that are doing that as well. There’s an MSI, right? There’s an Origins, which is a local account from the United States. Here are some — this is an iBuyPower, and this is — I can’t remember what this one is. This is a Main Gear, excuse me. Again, these are gaming PCs in the desktop category. We think those are fascinating.

The next I want to show you is this Toshiba up here. This Toshiba up here — and I’ll have you back up, and we’ll get the camera from behind, have you back up out of the sensor, there you go. I hope you can see it on the computer up there. It actually has the Kinect sensor with it. So, this is the Kinect here. It’s running off of the Windows — the Microsoft WorldWide Telescope in Microsoft Research.

And I can control it by standing about this far from the device, and I can show it, right? Here I am sweeping those side to side. You can see that that’s showing that planet. These are images taken from the WorldWide Telescope, using the Kinect sensor, so that engineers who built this application — you can even see that device moving back and forth — the engineers who built this application were able to use that Kinect sensor — I’m going in and going out — to build an interface just for this application, right? This is a Toshiba laptop running an AMD Lano chip. And so it’s actually very powerful computing hardware on a very inexpensive platform, and a really interesting use of the Kinect device to be an interface point, using the Kinect SDK and the Windows — sorry, the Microsoft WorldWide Telescope images.

Okay, so let’s go over here, right? I want to show you a couple of all-in-ones. We think there’s some really interesting innovation happening in all-in-ones around the world. We think increasingly that touch interface on all-in-one is going to be a big part of computing.

This is an Asus all-in-one. We think it’s just about the biggest all-in-one in the world. Super-high graphic resolution, really good surround sound ultra-PC.

Here’s an HP TouchSmart. This HP TouchSmart is running an app called Mosaic by the Tribune Media Company. It allows you to sort of view news through a graphical way and decide what thing you want to drill into.

So, here’s an American football game I was watching yesterday where my team from Atlanta lost, so it wasn’t a particularly good day for us, but this thing also can pivot. You can view it from multiple angles. You can even do it almost flat. So, you could use it in a retail environment or you could use it in some other corporate environment I haven’t even thought of yet. So, that is an HP all-in-one, and there are several other all-in-ones here.

Okay, we’re going to go back and we’re going to end — oh, sorry, let me show you the servers. I forgot this.

This is a MISER server running Windows MultiPoint. It’s powering these four what we’ll call terminals here, and it’s one where we’ll demo in a moment what a teacher and a student environment might look like using Windows MultiPoint Server.

And this is a Small Business Server, a Small Business Server application, again we think the first best server for small businesses.

Now we’ll end on the consumer PCs. So, we’ll go right back to the middle here. Thank you, guys.

We wanted to show you — to close out the hardware wall we wanted to show you a few of the really interesting consumer PCs that are just shipping now, that are just shipping in this market now for the first time from several of our big OEM partners.

The first I’ll show you actually is this new Sony Vaio Z. This is a fascinating machine running a Core i7, very thin and light, less than 3 pounds. If I add this little battery, which weighs less than a pound, this thing gets 15 hours of battery life on a Core i7, 15 hours of battery life just with that little guy there.

It has this as its docking station. The docking station comes with a great graphics output. When you plug it in, it automatically cycles the PC into high output graphics mode, because it’s got switchable graphics. And that’s actually a really interesting feature from Sony.

The second one I’ll show is this Acer. This is the new Aspire S3. This Aspire S3 is actually just shipping I believe next week in the Gulf region, in Dubai for the first time. This PC is fairly inexpensive compared to some of these up here. At the same time, it’s about six-tenths of an inch wide, weighs about 2.5 pounds, gets about seven hours of battery life; again that’s a core i7, that’s a core i7.

Two more briefly. This is the Asus 121. This PC is also running a Core i7. It’s tiny, and you’ll see just how tiny it really is. It’s half an inch, right? You can see just how tiny that is. It’s half an inch, super light. I can carry that all day long, and just a beautiful design with metal alloy, and really good performance as well. We like this device a lot.

And the last one I’ll show, which is the first time we’ve showed this device anywhere, the last one I’ll show is this Lenovo. This is the U300S Lenovo. This Lenovo is an also Core i7, a brand new machine, weighs about 2.5 pounds, 2.6 pounds, again about six-tenths of an inch wide — you can see that right there — and a really good device for the market. It’s the first time Lenovo has shown this, and so we’re very pleased that it’s here at GITEX.

So, what I’ve shown you today is a whole range of devices. I’ve shown you phones, we went through embedded, right, we talked about commercial PCs, went through some gaming devices, all-in-ones, servers, and came back to consumers PCs.

So, that’s great to see the hardware, that makes a lot of sense, we like that. I do believe that again we have the widest array of devices in the industry, which we think is great, but that doesn’t really explain some of the seamless experiences we’re talking about.

So, to do that, I want to invite up my colleague, Ryan Asdourian. He’s going to go through the software side of some of this, and show how these hardware devices interact with software in a really compelling way. So, Ryan, take it away.

RYAN ASDOURIAN: All right, thanks, John.

All right, so John took us through a number of products and a lot of hardware innovation on the wall behind me. I’m going to take all the great software with the great hardware, and kind of demonstrate some innovative scenarios, and I’m going to take you through those right now.

Now, if you’ve been walking around today, you might have noticed that throughout the venue Internet has kind of been on and off, and I apologize ahead of time if some of these demos don’t work. I’m going to take you through the ones that I can. A lot of them are cloud connected. And I’m going to talk you through the ones if we happen to run into any Internet issues.

So, the first one I want to talk to you about is kind of a student scenario. Now, being a student today you get a lot of access to technology, a lot of cool things, and one of the things that if I was a student today I wish I had was this. This is the Samsung Series 7 slate PC.

Now, John talked about this on the wall. I’m going to talk about how you would use this as a student.

So, the first thing I’ve got fired up here is Microsoft OneNote. You take a lot of notes as a student. You’ve got this great application here.

Now, this PC is very versatile. You can use it with the keyboard and mouse, you can use it with touch, and you can use it with a pen, which is the way that we’re used to taking notes.

So, I’ll show you here we were doing an exercise as a school, and it’s basically if we can measure an object that’s over 15 meters tall. Now, I had the honor of going to the Burch Khalifa while I was here, so we started building this demo around that. We show different tabs here to show ancient ways you could measure this, some modern methods. You can see I’ve already kind of marked this up. I’ve used the pen to do that, and now what I want to show is how we’ve integrated this across lots of different products.

Now, Microsoft released a free program called Mathematics that is really great for students. That’s integrated directly into OneNote, and let me show you how that works.

I’ve got an equation that I want to put here, so I’m actually going to use my pen, and I’m going to decide I want to ink an equation right here. It brings up this ink. I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to start writing here. And so when I do that, there we go, see if it can read my handwriting. So, there we go. So, I’ve got that equation, I go ahead and insert that, and it puts it there right inside my OneNote document.

The great part about this is it really reads my handwriting, and because of the integration with Mathematics, it understands there’s an equation, that I can actually solve that equation, and do some of the homework and projects that I’m working on.

Now, this is what the actual Mathematics application looks like. There’s the equation right there. I can solve for it.

What’s really cool about this is I can come to the graphing tab, I’ve got another equation here, I can use touch, I can move around this. You actually see a graph of the actual equation that I want to solve for.

It’s a really great way for students to use the tools, free tools, and make learning more efficient, more fun, and connected to their digital world.

Now, as I’m doing that in OneNote, one of the things about OneNote is it’s always saving your documents, right? If it’s tied to SkyDrive, there’s OneNote on the phone, there’s OneNote on the PC, and it’s all connected up to the cloud.

I can actually come over here, and if I refresh this, it will show me that this was just updated constantly, like it was just updated a moment ago. So, I can use the Web to kind of keep track of all my changes as I’m going along.

Now, one of the things that I want to do is use PowerPoint. As a student I want to kind of show off my work to the class. So, I have this PowerPoint deck all put together. So, here’s the PowerPoint deck.

Now, if I want to go ahead and actually present that, one of the things I would have to do is print it out or send it all to my classmates. Well, in this scenario I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to waste the paper from printing it, and I actually have some classmates that might be on the road. Say they’re on their PCs remotely or say they’re even on their phone remotely. I can actually help control what they see of this presentation.

So, I come to slideshow. I’m going to use a feature called Broadcast Slideshow. So, I go ahead, I start the broadcast. This is going to connect PowerPoint up into the cloud. So, it’s going ahead and connecting to the service. We’ll give it a second; here you go. So, it prepares the presentation. As it does this, it’s uploaded into the cloud.

Now, it’s going to give me the option, it’s going to give me a link that I’m actually going to want to send out. Let’s see if we can get the Internet to work here for a second. Okay, we’re 95 percent of the way there. So, we’ll let this go for a little bit.

The idea here with broadcasting the PowerPoint is I’m really able to control what they see when I want them to see it.

So, on all the other PCs that will actually connect to broadcast they are going to actually see when I move the slides, when I go back, they’re going to see the transitions, they’re going to see everything.

Let me go ahead and cancel this, and I’m going to try it one more time here. It’s connecting to the service. Here we go. All right, so we’re almost there. But as you can imagine, you have a person on the other end of this that’s actually on their phone, right? So, here’s my Windows Phone 7. And I’d go ahead, I’d get that e-mail, and they would see as I move and swipe across on the slate, it changes on the phone for them right there.

Now, let me go ahead and connect here. All right. So, I’m not seeing the Internet on this one right here. If you want to turn that on one more time, I’ll start on these other demos.

So, one of the things about having a Windows Phone, the first thing about it is it’s connected to people. People are first, and you’re able to create groups, you’re able to really connect to people in multiple ways. You can text in groups as well.

And my phone can actually see and hear. So, let me show you what I mean by that.

Let’s see if I can get on the Internet one more time. See if I see the right spot. Okay, one second. Here we go. So, I’m actually connecting right now. Now let’s go ahead and try this.

Now, you heard John talk about Bing. I’ve got Bing right here on my phone. So, I come here, it shows me the picture of the day, very cool way to kind of keep in touch with Bing here, and it has the ability to really see.

So, I have this thing called Bing Vision. So, I go ahead and click this, and here I’ve got a little menu that’s actually in French. Let’s see if I can scan this text right here. So, if you can see this here, it’s finding the text on my phone. You see how it’s highlighted all this text, hopefully you can see there those little boxes. I hit the translate button, and it actually just that quickly connects to the cloud, translates that entire page. And, suddenly, if I’m in a foreign country, I have that in my native language, I know what’s on the menu. I can order confidently. Very nice feature, very nice way to pull it all together.

But, it can see more than just translations. Here I’ve got this flyer for Thor. Now, phones have been able to read bar codes for a while, but my Windows Phone can do a bit more. I’m actually just going to kind of come over and hover over this. So, we’ll go ahead and let it see that it’s a flyer here. And if you look there, it actually brought up Thor. It could read and tell what it was just from looking at the picture.

Now, it’s going ahead and pulling in information from the Internet, about, I can get reviews, I can get prices of where I can buy it, even apps that are tied to it, all sorts of information about what I’m looking at. It ties to a database of billions of photos and images, and can tell what you’re actually looking at. It’s very smart.

The last thing I want to show over here is how it can actually hear. So, if I come here I’ve got Bing Music. If I go ahead and turn that song on from the back, I’m going to press the Bing Music button, wait for the song to come on. I’ll hold this down.

(Music played.)

There you go. Thank you. So, you see it actually brought up Tonight Tonight by Hot Chelle Rae. It knew the song, and it was able to bring that up. Now, phones have also been able to listen to music for a bit. However, in this case, it’s about the scenario and how it’s really tied together. I’ve got Marketplace on here, and I’ve got Zune. You heard John talk about Zune. Well, I go ahead, I go into Marketplace, I can download that song. I can buy it, I can download it. And what happens is, I now have it on my phone. But then I go home at night, and I charge my phone, I plug it in, it wirelessly and automatically syncs to my PC, brings in that information, transfers it, and now suddenly that same song I downloaded on my phone, it’s on my PC, it’s in the cloud. My music, it’s everywhere I expect it to be, anytime I want, on any device. A very cool way of doing that.

Now, we’ve got music, we’ve got Bing, we’ve got games. We’ve got lots of different great scenarios on the phone. But one of the things I also want to highlight is how you use this as a business, right?

So, let me come over here and I’ll show you the scenario where I kind of have a small business put together. So, I come here, and I’ve actually built an Office 365 site. You heard us talk a little bit about Office 365. I’ve got my team site here. I log in, and I want to get my actual documents. So, I’m going to go ahead, click into this, and it is going to bring up the documents that I have in my document library. It works just like a SharePoint site if you’re familiar with the way SharePoint works.

So, we’ll go ahead and we’ll wait for that to open. I can open that let’s try that again. We’ll have some Internet issues there, I’m going to try on the phone as well. The idea here is that I can go ahead and I can pull that in from the cloud. I can edit it through the Web, but over here on my phone, let’s come back to this, I actually am tied to that same Office 365 SharePoint site. So, I come here and I see those presentations. We couldn’t see them on the computer this time, but I promise you they’re there. So, I’m going to go ahead, I’m going to click Sales Presentation. We’ll see if this opens up. There we go.

So, there’s my actual file. Now, the scenario that’s really interesting and compelling that really changes the way people work is, before if I wanted to edit a PowerPoint document, I really needed to have access to a PC, open up that PowerPoint document, start the editing. But now what I can do is, I can actually call up my colleague and say, hey, I just made some changes, they’re on our SharePoint. What I need you to do is log on with your phone, review them, and make any changes that you think are necessary.

So, what I’m actually going to do is, I make that call. I bring this up. And with the power of the phone here, I actually have the ability to edit. So, I hit edit, and now this becomes editable PowerPoint. Never before have you been able to edit actual PowerPoint documents on your phone. I click this, I see this is outside Concierge 2011, just to make this easy, I’ll say 2012. I’ll say okay. I’m going to say done. And then I’m going to go ahead and click save.

Now, when I click save right here, you see it’s connecting up there. It’s actually uploading those changes, whatever changes I made, straight to the SharePoint site. My colleague was on the road, in his car, or wherever he was, making those changes remotely, and now I’m back in my office. They’ve already uploaded. I’m going to come back here and see if I can get on. It looks like the Internet is still down here. I apologize for that.

Here we go. So, I’m going to go ahead and click this. That’s good news. And I click that. We’ll see that it’s changed from 2011 to 2012, so it’s loading that file right now, we see that. Perfect. And there you have it, loaded up to 2012, very seamless, very easy. So, I’ve got the phone. It can do all sorts of things, games, consumer scenarios, commercial scenarios, the music scenarios, all of that.

Over here what I want to show you is all the apps. We talk about apps a lot, and John had mentioned the 30,000 apps for Windows Phone. Well, what we really have here is the Marketplace on the Web. So, it’s easy to search them, see what’s going on with all these different applications, and really bring down the ones that make a difference in your life. So, we talked about some Web apps.

The last one that I want to show you is that everything is familiar. I showed you how easy PowerPoint was on the Web, and you can use the full fidelity version. Now this is up, I can actually open this in PowerPoint. But over here, I have it in Excel. The Web app works just the same. I can edit it here, and I’m not in the full application here. You can see from the page that I’m actually in the browser. Everything you expect, the commonly used tasks, they all work. So, if I were to right-click here, you see I get those common tasks, cut, copy, paste, they’re right there in the Web browser without me even opening the full application. Not only that, even from the Web, I can come up to file, and I get the print option here, I get a lot of options that I’m familiar with. A great way to tie back into the things that you’re doing.

So, I’ve covered consumer, covered commercial. I’ve played the role of a student. Now let me show you in the last little demo I have how MultiPoint Server is really changing a lot of this. Windows MultiPoint Server, John touched upon this for a second, and I’m going to bring him back up on stage, and I want him to help me do this demo by actually playing the part of a student, because I’m going to show you how it really helps a teacher. It brings the ability to accelerate PCs in the classroom just go ahead over there for me, thank you it accelerates us getting PCs into the classroom. You only buy that one MultiPoint Server, and suddenly you can connect up to 25 terminal sets. So, that’s like buying 25 PCs for those students. It gets more of those PCs in the classroom. And we want to make sure that the teacher is in control.

Now, what we have over there, I didn’t want to bring 25 monitors because we wanted to show all these other hardware innovations, but what I have over there is those four monitors, and the MultiPoint Server right below it. Now, the one in the middle rack on the right is actually my administrator console. I’m logged into it here, and it’s over there. The other three are potential students that are in the classroom.

Now, as I look over here, I think you can see my screen, let’s take a look at my screen really quick. What I see here is the administrator console. So, I see what all three screens are doing. As I do that, I see that John has actually started to go to YouTube and kind of mess around. As a teacher, I don’t want him doing that.

So, what I’m going to do is, I can write a little custom message, and I can actually come over here and say, block this station. As soon as I do that, he gets the message: John, get back to work. Very nice way for the teacher to be able to control that.

Now, if he happened to be doing something really good, what I could actually do is take his screen, I could take all the other students, and broadcast his screen to the other students, really helping group learning. And if I want to deliver a presentation on my own computer, and I want them all to see it, what I can actually do is, I’m going to come here, and I’m going to select all these PCs. I’m going to say, project my station to selected stations. So, I’m going to go ahead and click that.

And what happens when I do that is what they were working on is going to change, and what they’re going to see is whatever I want them to see.

So, here I brought up a PowerPoint, you see it lit up on all three of those screens, very easy, very seamless. So, Windows MultiPoint Server really brings that technology quickly to the classroom, saves money, really great solution.

Now, we’ve gone now through consumer, commercial. We’ve shown you lots of hardware. You’ve seen how great hardware and great software come together for all types of scenarios. So, that’s a bit about the innovation that we’re bringing. We’re very excited and thank you for your time.

Back to you, John.

JOHN CASE: Thanks, Ryan. All right. (Applause.)

Okay. So, I will sum up what we’ve talked about so far, and while I’m doing that I think we’re going to switch the PCs for the next set of demos for the Office 365 work. So, I’ll go through this while they’re doing that. But, I wanted to kind of talk about what we’ve talked about so far today.

The first thing is, we’ve seen a whole range of devices, right. And I think that the thing I’ll stress to you over and over again is that Windows powers the broadest array, the broadest choice of devices in the market. We saw everything from large servers to embedded devices, to phones, to PCs. And I think that’s going to continue to just grow and grow, and grow and we’re very excited about that.

Secondly, you saw all sorts of new ways to interact with those devices. You saw keyboards, you saw mice, you saw touch, you saw pens in what Ryan was doing. You saw handwriting, you saw voice, and you saw gestures when I touched the Kinect. And increasingly those different ways of interfacing are just going to create more and more scenarios for our partners, more and more scenarios for the industry. We think that’s very exciting.

You’ve also seen some of the software that we’re shipping and some of the solutions we’re shipping, some of the services that we’re creating, powered by IE 9, but going into all sorts of consumer and commercial environments. We think that’s a tremendous amount of innovation. And the last thing I’d say is Microsoft is doing a lot of this, but we’re doing it only with our partners. We cannot do it without the partners around the world, the partners in this room, whether they be on the silicon side, or the OEM side, or the software side, those partners are the thing that makes the industry go. So, I want to first of all say thank you to our partners who are here today, who are helping us create this world of innovation. And I wanted to stress that we are continuing to be committed to that level of partner innovation and to your partner success.

If you want to see more of these devices, and want to look at them live and play with them, many of them will be available in our booth free to look at. Here’s the location of our booth. We think that’s very exciting. I will point out that the DJ machine here, which is a Windows 7 slate, by the way, that you were listening to on the way in, you might not have known that, is going to be just here. So, you might want to walk up and look at that at the end.

So, I wanted to say thank you, right in a whole bunch of languages, and I hope that your correct language is on here. Again, we cannot do this without you. We’re very happy that you were able to make time to spend time with us today to look through this range of innovation on the hardware and software side.

So, with that said I’m going to call up my colleague from the Microsoft Office Division. I’m hoping that they’re ready. Takeshi Numoto, who is the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Office, he’s going to talk you through things that are happening with Office 365 that he’s announcing, and developments that are happening here in the industry. So, Takeshi, why don’t you join us?

TAKESHI NUMOTO: Thanks.

JOHN CASE: Are you on? Great. I’d like to say thank you to all of you and we’ll see you later. Here you go, bud.

TAKESHI NUMOTO: So, thank you and welcome. I’m really excited to be here. This is my first time in Dubai and it’s nothing like arriving in a new market to basically announce the availability of one of the products we really, really care about. Today I’m going to talk to you about Office 365 and before I actually start getting into the presentation, I just wanted to show you a quick video clip to just give you a sense of what we’re going to be talking about for the next 45 minutes or so.

(Video presentation.)

(Applause.)

TAKESHI NUMOTO: I’ve been with the company at Microsoft for 15 years. I worked on Windows for the first seven years and I’ve worked on Office for the last eight. And one of the key things that I really enjoy about being part of our efforts is that we’ve always been about connecting people to the things they love and care about, connecting people to family, friends, colleagues, communities, and businesses and information. And productivity tools has always been a really important part of our mission, and Office has been absolutely core in the way we try to serve in this need. As a result, Office is now used on over $1 billion PCs around the world today.

So, with the power of Office we see the companies and businesses of all sizes operate at an efficiency and scale that’s really unprecedented, yet at the same time we know from our business customers in particular they’re looking for technology to make a bigger impact. They want technologies that help their teams come together in a more effective way, combine their expertise and knowledge, so that they can drive even better outcomes.

And Office 365 is our answer to that. We believe that collaboration isn’t just about great group dynamics. It’s about instant access to information. It’s about helping people make the right decisions and take the right actions at the same time. And it’s a really critical function and a capability for any organization of any size. And to address such a critical need we believe that collaboration technologies really need to address great capabilities and scenarios for the broadest set of people.

With Office 365 you can access your most up to date email, documents and contacts on all the devices you use. You can share your calendar and make scheduling much easier. You can stay connected and actually get things done quickly with secure instant messaging. You could have virtual meetings with your colleagues, partners, or customers, whether they’re around the corner or across the globe. And multiple people can work on the same document all at the same time with all the data and the document fidelity intact, so that you can be more effective. And even the smallest businesses can have a presence on the Web that’s highly professional and they can edit that with the ease of editing, just a Word document. For us Office 365 is the way to deliver that capability and we do this by combining the power of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, and delivering it in a way in an integrated way through the Office experience that hundreds of millions of customers around the world are already familiar with.

We already launched Office 365 in June in 40 geographies around the world. And we received really positive feedback from that. Some of the review quotes are shared here. Anyone remember Pong? Do people remember Pong, remember the paddles going up and down and it was a little simplified tennis-like game. Having a comparison where our competition is compared to Pong and we are more affiliated with Halo really is both fun and also a telling indication of our progress.

In the first three months since we’ve launched the service we’ve already seen some important milestones take shape for us. For example, in just the first two weeks after launch, we’ve had over 50,000 customers either try or buy Office 365. That means we had a customer every 25 seconds. And that’s a great indication of the momentum and excitement we’re seeing. We also have doubled the size of the the number of the partners participating in our ecosystem around Office 365. We now have over 42,000 cloud partners ready to basically deliver Office 365 to our customers.

And we’ve been studying some of the ROI realized by our early customers. And we commissioned Forrester to do a total economic impact study and that study shows that many of our customers, particularly in the medium-sized business space, can realize ROIs of 300 percent and payback in a period of about two months. So far the response and the traction we’ve seen in customers has just been tremendous.

So, I already said that Office 365 has been launched in 40 geographies around the world last June. But, now today I’m really excited to announce that we’re going to be delivering Office 365 in four Gulf regions, namely UAE, right here in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar. And we’ll be delivering that as a trial initially by the end of this calendar year.

And starting today we will actually start taking pre-registrations so that we can get you going on trying Office, or get you trying Office 365 as soon as it’s available.

And I would really encourage people to take advantage of this, because when I say trial it’s really the full service experience all the experience that we deliver in our 40 regions that we’ve already launched in, except for the ability to actually charge customers and transact. So, that’s the only missing piece. You really can get the full service experience and get a very intimate feel for the capabilities and the opportunities that the service can provide.

To give you a quick sense of what that Office 365 experience is like, I want to invite my colleague Samer on stage to do a quick demo together. But, I would say that I’m in this very enviable position right now of trying to demo a cloud-based collaboration solution with a somewhat intermittent Internet connection. So, bear with me if some of the things don’t work out, but we’ll give it a shot and hopefully you get a flavor for the capabilities we are going to be delivering.

So, of course, as a cloud service the first thing you’ll see is that you’re going to sign in to use the service. So, I’m going to be I’m at the Office 365 portal signing in. So, I get to type in credentials in front of lots of people, which is always fun. So, here I’m signing into my Office 365 service. And the first thing you see there is that we drop you into an end-user portal that really brings all of these experiences together. You have Outlook experiences powered by Exchange. You have Lync that gives you great unified-communications experience, and a SharePoint-powered collaboration site. And it’s all right here at a glance, and the UI walks you through it.

I’m also an admin, the IT admin of this site, so I get this extra IT admin tab that lets me easily add users or configure who has access to which site, which is also a great capability that our customers love.

But, I will just drop into this team site, where a lot of our collaboration is going to take place. The first thing I wanted to show you is the ability to co-author the same Excel document. So, here I’m going to open this in the browser, Rami (ph) is going to open exactly the same document on his machine and one of the things the first you notice is that the full fidelity of the document is maintained, even when it’s rendered in the browser. So, you can see things like sparklines, or data bars, like here. And you get the full experience. You get the graphs and charts and stuff like that.

So, Rami is going to make a change on his machine and you can see that change getting reflected in my view of the spreadsheet pretty quickly. So, now instead of 99 the price in March it’s $3,000 and so as I scroll down if he makes one more change you can see how it actually dynamically reflects the latest data, like that.

So, now I’m going to go back and show you another kind of a co-authoring scenario, with a little bit of a different vector. So, Ryan already showed you OneNote. What he didn’t show you is that OneNote is a great digital note-taking application that lets you organize all sorts of different information, text, audio and video, screen clippings, Web clippings, you can organize all of that in a very flexible way, but it gets even better when you can share it with others. So, here I’ve got it open on the rich client. So, I have a OneNote application running on my PC, with the full capabilities, and Rami has opened the same notebook in his browser.

Even though he has it open in the browser, and I have it open on the rich client, we can still do co-authoring to share the information all at the same time. So, here let’s say I’m going to add a couple of items and I have made some updates. One of the other things that OneNote does that’s really, really interesting is it lets me follow who made changes to what type of document. So, here I can actually see what portion was contributed by me, TN, what portion was contributed from the various members of my team. So, it’s easy really to go back and ask for follow-up or clarification.

And so as I sync, my update should show up on his machine and you can see that the latest update from Rami is now showing up with a highlight showing that it’s the most recently changed, that I’m basically inheriting from others. So, you can get a clear sense of a great collaboration, a great experience across the browser, and across the PC. But, it’s not just across the PC and browser, I can actually show the same scenario happening on the phone. So, here I have Windows Phone the Mango version. And like you’ve seen before, you get a great Office Hub, updated Office Hub experience, as you can see, on the screen.

And once I drop in, again, I have my OneNote notebook at my fingertips on the phone. I can get access to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on these documents, too, on the phone as well. And I can actually get to all those places where I would store my Office documents to share with my colleagues or friends. So, I can go to SkyDrive, or I can go to SharePoint at my company, or I can actually go to SharePoint as part of Office 365.

Here I’m going to go back and open the same notebook that we just opened and you can see that it’s synching to get the latest information. And you also notice that what we do is, we actually reflow the document so that the same notebook that was really rendered on the PC actually looks really optimized for reading on the phone rather than just crunching it and making it smaller, we actually reflow the document. So, you have all the same data, but you actually get a view that is optimized for the phone.

And so, I can of course do things like take a photo, or update the list. I can click add a photo using the camera phone or the phone on the camera, camera on the phone. It’s kind of blurry and dark. It’s refusing to actually shut it down. But I can take a photo, and it will go into the notebook, and once it’s synched, it will show up on the PC and the browser as well.

So, one of the other things I wanted to show you is that when you think about things like unified communication, or instant messages, we actually don’t think of it as just a siloed application that you have to separately open. So, one of the things you notice is that we built in Lync right into that SharePoint experience, so that I know Rami is the person who last updated this PowerPoint presentation on the team site. If I wanted to know what he did with it, or what the update was, I can quickly right from within the SharePoint site instantiate an IM conversation, like with Lync.

So, hopefully Rami will accept. And Lync is very one of the cool things about Lync is that it’s highly extensible. So, you can do things like do add-ons that will add an ability to translate your IM conversations. So, of course, I don’t speak Arabic, or can write Arabic, but I can use the power of Bing translation to actually get this translated, and then send it over, and now he can respond, and such.

It’s also very easy to move from one modality of the conversation, in this case IM, to extend it to others. So, Rami is going to actually invite me to a videoconference right from within Lync. And so, as he does that, I will get an invite, and I accept the video call, and I start my own video. So, you can quickly get to from an IM to a videoconference just like this, it’s very quickly. You don’t have to open a separate app. And if I wanted to go further, I can then start sharing different portions of my environment. I can show my desktop. I can share programs so we can view it together. Or we can actually look at a PowerPoint presentation together, and we’ll do some of this later, and you’ll get to see it. But I wanted to show how easy it is to go from an IM conversation to a video conversation, and to even share more rich context together.

Of course, when you talk about communication we cannot skip Outlook, which is such a core part of so many people’s work style, and one of the first things I wanted to show you was how easy it was to take an email that often contains fuller function items, and actually start a collaborative effort. Like in this case I have a mail that talks about some new numbers we need to go over. And so, I’m just, with one click, I’m actually going to set up a meeting to talk about these new numbers, and I can look at the schedule, and Office 365 easily lets me find out what time would work for everyone. So, I can find an open slot that works for both of us, let’s say, maybe tomorrow at nine.

And maybe I actually don’t think that we should meet physically, because I’m on the road, but we should meet online. So I can turn this meeting from a physical meeting to an online meeting with just one click and send it off.

And then, to show you what kind of an experience you get in one of these virtual meetings, let me start off on one of the ones that’s already been scheduled. So, you have a meeting reminder. And you can see with one click I can join that virtual meeting online from right within Outlook. That launches Lync, and I’m going to be in the meeting as it was set up. So, it’s starting, and it’s also downloading the PowerPoint presentation that’s been set up for this virtual meeting.

So, now I actually can see Rami’s presence. You can actually also, if there are lots of participants on this virtual meeting, you can actually identify who is talking because the color of this handset changes, so you can identify who is talking. And, of course, if you want to add video, like we did before, you can do that, too. So, this gives you a quick idea of how you can set up virtual meetings very quickly, and get into it. And you can also use collaborative tools in the meeting, like Rami has done, where I can pick up a pen, and do pointers. I think you were doing some and then it shows up on his end as well.

So, that’s a quick view of how we make it super-easy to collaborate and share information with your customer, partner, or your team members. Now, let me go back and talk about how Office 365 also enables basically a sort of collaboration engagement with the broader public, in this case a public-facing website.

So, I go to this website, and even as the smallest business I can quickly launch this homepage and edit it as easy as I would a Word document. So, my view on your right, on your left, is basically the view I’m seeing where I’m editing the website. And Rami’s view on the other screen basically shows what the public would see externally.

So, I can quickly do things like change the color of this text, edit it as you would pretty much any Word document. I can add things like maybe I want to add map and direction to the event on my site. So, I’m going to add a Web part, maps and directions. And just for purposes of this demo, I can quickly cut and paste the Microsoft address here, and you will see that I’ve just added a Web part that shows dynamically where the event is going to be based on the address I put. And it was this easy, and all I have to do is to save and publish.

And so, then when Rami refreshes his browser, you can see that the update is now public, and you can see the edits reflected externally, and it’s really easy to keep a very professional looking website just like this with Office 365.

So, hopefully this gave you a very quick glimpse of the kind of capabilities and collaboration capacities that Office 365 will bring to everyone.

Thanks a lot, Rami.

PARTICIPANT: Pleasure.

TAKESHI NUMOTO: So, I wanted to get back to the presentation.

Now that you’ve seen the capabilities, sort of gotten a quick glimpse at the capabilities that Office 365 provides, I thought I would walk you through what we’re hearing from the customers that have already gone to the cloud with Office 365, and what are the key benefits that they’re seeing.

The four consistent themes that we continuously hear from the customers that have already taken advantage of Office 365 really boil down to four things. First is anywhere access; second is security and reliability; third is IT management and control; and fourth is around value. And I’m going to walk through each one of these.

In terms of anywhere access, I think it’s all too familiar to all of you, the days of you not being productive when you’re not at your desk is completely over. Every one of our customers tell us that no matter where they are, even when they are away from their desk, they need to be able to continue to get things done. And it’s about getting great access to the latest e-mails, and the documents, being able to do that without the complexity and the hassles of setting up VPN, and getting end users trained on how to use it, things like that, and with Office 365, of course, as you’ve seen in many of these demos, both mine and before, we make it really easy for you to stay on top of your information no matter where you are, and across any device.

The second benefit that we consistently hear from our customers is kind of the peace of mind that comes from knowing that they have the service being run by Microsoft. Not having the customer’s IT managers tied to servers, and spending lots of cycle maintaining very complex infrastructure. They no longer need to do it. The customers love the fact that Microsoft is working 24/7 to actually provide protection from malware, or spam, and actually doing 24/7 security monitoring.

They also love the fact that they can take advantage of the infrastructure investment that Microsoft has made, so that they can have the infrastructure in a geographically dispersed way. So, even when you have one datacenter go down for some catastrophe, Microsoft has invested in redundant capacity in other places so that your data continues to run, and you can continue operation from another datacenter.

And for many of our customers, these kind of disaster recovery capabilities far exceed the kind of capabilities they can provide on their own. And, of course, Office 365 is backed up by an industry-leading and financially backed service level agreement for 99.9 uptime.

And then, thirdly, the benefit we consistently hear from customers is around IT control and management. Going to the cloud should not mean that you’re losing control. Office 365 provides capabilities for our customers so that they can set up role-based access. You can control who has access to which kind of sites or information, and it’s of course very important when you think about things like HR or payroll information.

Customers also love the fact that they get a single administration site for all of the service. And perhaps even more importantly, they really love the fact that all these services work together. SharePoint, setting up SharePoint to work with Exchange and Lync, that’s all taken care of. You heard a customer in one of the videos talk about how Office 365 delivers the experience, the Office experience that it was meant to be. And that really summarizes some of the benefits in terms of integration and IT management that Office 365 delivers.

And, lastly but not the least, the customer value that we’re consistently hearing is one of value. When you think about the fact that being able to take advantage of cutting-edge collaboration technologies without the need for upfront capital expenditures around hardware and software, and actually the ongoing investment that you would otherwise need in terms of headcount and resources to continue to run the service, and not needing to deal with it is just a huge factor for so many of our customers who otherwise won’t have the capacity to provision the collaboration technologies themselves.

This transition from CAPEX to OPEX also makes things like budgeting so much easier than before. It also makes sort of the consumption of these capabilities so much more elastic. If you have seasonal workers, you can add users for the month where you need the additional capability, additional capacity, and once you’re done, if your seasonal workload is now over, then you can reduce the size of the capacity you’re purchasing, and right size your IT spends. And those are all factors that we hear great feedback from our customers.

Now, rather than me talking more about these customer vignettes, I want to invite Ronnie Alwad (ph), CEO of our first Office 365 customer in this region. I’m honored to talk to him, and get his perspective on how he thinks about Office 365, and the opportunity ahead for him.

(Applause.)

RONNIE ALWAD: Thank you. Thank you everyone.

TAKESHI NUMOTO: Tell us a little bit about your company?

RONNIE ALWAD: Well, we are aviation field supply company, and we supply the major airline, and private jet airliners as well 24/7, and we are already six months right now in the Asia market, and we do have some contracts already done.

TAKESHI NUMOTO: Great. And so what was it like sort of thinking about going with Office 365, how did you come to the conclusion that Office 365 was your fit?

RONNIE ALWAD: Well, actually the IT thinks it. It’s the major bane for any decision- maker in any corporation. Nowadays, if you are looking for the better and high-quality IT, you have to ask an IT company. They will say Linux is better, X is better, Y is better, but we try all and unfortunately we didn’t find a solution. Then a Microsoft business partner came out and demonstrated the Office 365 and we find all what we need on it. So, it was a very good chance to have Office 365 in-house and use it for our company.

TAKESHI NUMOTO: Great. What did you need to get ready for it, as Office 365 comes through this marketplace? Do you have any advice for your fellow customers in terms of thinking about Office 365?

RONNIE ALWAD: Yes, I do have. It is just with all the features, that we see here, and if you just have a look and try the software, you’ll be confident, first of all to be relaxed from the pain of the IT, because Microsoft is taking care about your IT issues. And the second thing is the cost effectiveness is really a very good part if you just calculate the cost of the IT maintenance and so on. So, my advice is to go ahead with it and you will be more happy than me, as well.

TAKESHI NUMOTO: Thank you very much.

RONNIE ALWAD: Thank you. (Applause.)

TAKESHI NUMOTO: To make it really easy to get going, and because we believe collaboration is such a core capability need for organizations of all sizes, we prepared various Office 365 plans to be capable of addressing the needs from the smallest customer to the large customer. We have different plans that can really span the needs of different customer types and scenarios.

Already some of the leading customers and brands, your sort of Fortune 500-type names are already betting on Office 365. You can I can talk about Coca-Cola Enterprises, Starbucks, Hyatt Hotels, Volvo, many, many companies that you know that are already betting on our cloud service as their collaboration solution. And they’re excited about Office 365, but in many aspects the small and medium customers are even more excited about Office 365, because if you think about it it’s these types of companies that really often don’t have the IT, or the financial resources to invest in the collaboration technologies that they really want. And we think Office 365 is just a fantastic fit for those customers that really never had access to these enterprise historically enterprise grade capabilities. And that’s why we’re so excited about the opportunity we have for our customers and partners as we transition to the cloud.

So, in closing, I just wanted to share how excited we are to be at a point where we can announce the upcoming availability of Office 365 trial in the four Gulf countries, and the start of the pre-registration, so that we can actually get to going on trial as soon as it’s available, in Office365. UAE is the site where you can pre-register and we really hope that you give it a try and give us your feedback and we continue to improve Office 365 and actually have it be the next generation of Office experiences as we embrace the cloud.

Thank you very much for the opportunity. Enjoy the rest of the conference.